Tresnjak: ‘Proud of every single moment’ at Globe

He can say it now: Running the Old Globe’s Summer Shakespeare Festival drove Darko Tresnjak up the wall.

Actually, several walls. It turns out that Tresnjak and other Globe diehards were regulars at climbing gyms around the county during the three-month run of the annual festival, which concluded two weeks ago.

It was a way of relieving stress and staying focused over the long stretch of the fest, whose three plays were staged in grueling nightly rotation.

“It’s mental; you have to decide which trail you’re going to take,” said Tresnjak of the climbing jaunts. “And then it’s social, because you can’t do it on your own.”

Sounds a little like making theater — which as it happens, is something Tresnjak no longer will be doing at the Globe. The theater announced in June that the Yugoslav-born director, hired six years ago to revive the Globe’s summer Shakespeare tradition, would step down both as artistic director of the festival and resident artistic director of the company.

Tresnjak’s resignation took effect at festival’s end. Adrian Noble, the artistic director of Britain’s esteemed Royal Shakespeare Company for 13 years, will direct the 2010 festival, which coincides with the Globe’s 75th anniversary.

Tresnjak leaves in place an event that has again become a summer fixture in San Diego. The 2009 festival, which began in late June, brought 39,691 playgoers to Balboa Park’s outdoor Lowell Davies Festival Stage, according to Globe figures.

That was a 6 percent decline from 2008, in a year that saw depressed attendance and revenues for many arts organizations due to the economic crisis.

Louis G. Spisto, the Globe’s CEO/executive producer, crafted the original plan that revived the festival and said he’s “very proud of the success it has achieved” since launching in 2004.

“Shakespeare is vitally important to our mission, and it will remain so,” Spisto says. “We wouldn’t bring Adrian Noble on if we weren’t serious about it.”

Tresnjak acknowledges that some of the plays he programmed had more innate popular appeal than others. The 2009 festival featured two Shakespeare works — the much-loved comedy “Twelfth Night” and the dark, rarely staged “Coriolanus” — plus Edmond Rostand’s bittersweet epic “Cyrano de Bergerac,” the first non-Shakespeare play to be part of the fest since it was revived.

Of those, the politically charged “Coriolanus” was the least audience-accessible but, for Tresnjak, one of the most satisfying experiences in his work as a director. (Tresnjak directed a total of 14 productions for the Globe starting in 2002, “Cyrano” among them.)

“Let’s face it, ‘Twelfth Night’ and ‘Cyrano’ were the two sort of crowd-pleasing plays for the summer, and ‘Coriolanus’ — both the play and the production — was likely to be a polarizing experience,” says Tresnjak of the tragedy, which he transplanted from Roman times to a tense setting of Europe in the 1930s. “You don’t expect ‘Coriolanus’ to do ‘Romeo and Juliet’ numbers.”

The staging did have the benefit of a fiercely memorable performance by Celeste Ciulla, a longtime festival regular (and the ringleader of the summer rock-climbing expeditions). Likewise, “Cyrano” boasted a turn for the ages by Broadway veteran and festival returnee Patrick Page, in the title role of the romantic hero with the oversized nose.

And all three plays benefited from a repertory company of Globe favorites (Bruce Turk, Eric Hoffmann, Katie MacNichol, Tony Von Halle and others), plus support from the busy student actors of the Globe/USD MFA program.

Even so, the rigors of repertory took their toll on the cast — so much so that for one performance of “Cyrano” in August, Tresnjak himself took the stage, for the first time in 18 years.

One complicating factor, for his small role as a musketeer: Tresnjak forgot to wear his glasses.

“It was terrifying,” he says. “I couldn’t see a damned thing. They were just dragging me around the stage in the right direction.”

To top it off, Tresnjak hadn’t rehearsed the scene in full costume. At a moment in the play when Cyrano feigns kicking the musketeer in the groin, Tresnjak doubled over and the wig flew off.

“Patrick picked it up as if he’d just scalped me, and raised it triumphantly,” Tresnjak recalls with a laugh. “And the audience went wild. He saved the moment, as usual.”

(Tresnjak adds that “apparently I screwed up some of my own blocking,” an admission that ought to get some actors gloating.)

Tresnjak describes his departure from the theater as his own decision, though he’s reluctant to venture beyond that.

He does says that “knowing what I know from the inside — what it took to run this festival, to mount three Shakespeare plays every summer on a schedule and on a budget — I’m proud of every single moment, every single actor, and I’m deeply appreciative of the Globe staff.”

For a few months last year, Tresnjak had been co-artistic director of the Globe, sharing the job with Jerry Patch, who joined the theater as resident artistic director in 2005. That dual arrangement came about after longtime artistic director (and multiple Tony-winner) Jack O’Brien took on “emeritus” status, as his busy directing career increasingly kept him away from the Globe.

But then Patch, too, left, for a job at Manhattan Theatre Club in New York. Tresnjak acknowledges that changed the dynamics of his role at the Globe, where Spisto has spearheaded the bulk of the programming for several years.

“Jerry Patch and I were a unique combination,” with Patch’s expertise in new plays and Tresnjak’s interest in classics and revivals — most notably his “mini-cycle” of American comedies that included “Bell, Book and Candle,” “The Pleasure of His Company” and “The Women.”

Tresnjak says he wasn’t sure those interests coincided with “what a theater like the Old Globe, which does 15 shows a year, needs year-round. And I can’t lie about who I am and what I believe in.”

His immediate plan is to stay in San Diego at least until spring, teaching at UCSD while also traveling to direct four shows back to back around the country. First up is “Twelfth Night” at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

At the Globe, Spisto will continue to lead the programming; there are no immediate plans to hire an artistic director, although Spisto and the board of directors are considering other options.

Spisto says his most immediate concern is completing the Globe’s $75 million capital campaign (the theater has

$3 million more to raise by June), while also preparing for the opening of the Conrad Prebys Theatre Center, a $22 million project that includes a new theater-in-the-round, an education center and other facilities.

The center and its Sheryl and Harvey White Theatre host an inaugural production in January, after a gala fundraiser Dec. 7 (featuring “South Pacific” stars Kelli O’Hara and Paulo Szot) and a public open house later that month.